My granny had a teapot. It was no ordinary teapot. In fact, it was far too precious to be used at all - except on Christmas Day. For the rest of the year it stood in isolated splendour behind the glass doors of her display cabinet. 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,' she would tell me as I squashed my nose up against the diamond panes and gazed at it in awe.
'That teapot belonged to your great-great-grandmother, it's very valuable - its my little nest egg - so I won't be a burden to anyone when I'm old. If anything goes wrong I can always sell the teapot.' To me, she was old already, and we all knew she would never sell the teapot - whatever happened.
Then one Christmas, a dreadful thing happened. At first it was like any other Christmas, with the usual family members gathered at Granny's house for Christmas dinner, and the usual festivities going on.
It was after dinner, when Granny declared 'Let's have some tea,' everyone knew she needed an excuse for the teapot's annual ceremonial appearance.
It was while we were all milling about in the kitchen tea that the fatal accident happened.
The crash cut a horrified silence right across all the happy noises in the house. 'If only you could turn the hands of a clock backwards,' was my instinctive thought.
My granny had hard, red quarry tiles on her back kitchen floor. I remember standing looking down at the pieces of teapot (which one of my uncle's had dropped), scattered in all directions over the shiny surface - sharp, jagged, painful pieces surrounding a pathetic heap of soggy tea leaves.
Then I looked up at Granny's face, and I will never foget her expression. Something precious, beautiful and irreplaceable had gone for ever. The future was no longer insured, and a lifeline to the past had been severed.
I remember the culprit uncle scrambling round the floor on hands and knees scooping up all the pieces he could find, he then hurled the bits of teapot in the bin, on top of the left-overs from Christmas dinner.
'Whatever are you doing?' my grandmother demanded. 'You can't throw it away!' 'Mother, that teapot will never hold tea again,' he said firmly.
She simply refused to accept such a terrible thought 'Anything can be mended,' she declared, and pushing past him, began snatching the pieces from amongst the debris, collecting them carefully in her apron.
After our hasty departure on that fateful Christmas afternoon, I did not see granny for a number of months. I often thought about her and wondered if she would manage to glue all the bits of her teapot back together again.
It was the following July before I went back to see her again, and the first thing I did was to dash into the dining-room.
Pressing my little nose flat against the doors of the glass cabinet. I looked for the teapot. It wasn't there. Only a dark circle where the velvet had not faded showed where it had once stood so proudly. Poor Granny, I thought she had failed.
Sadly, I turned round, and there on the window ledge in the sunshine I saw it - what was left of it anyway. Obviously, she had not managed to find all the pieces: most of the spout was missing, as was the lid, and the handle looked very odd. Like an excavated Egyptian vase in a museum, the teapot was full of little jagged holes and cracks. But Granny had green fingers, she could make anything grow - anywhere. She had filled the carcass of the teapot with rich compost, and out of these holes grew all kinds of beautiful little plants and flowers.
Miniature ferns and variegated ivy poked their way out of the gaps, and a begonia with tiny orange flowers cascaded from the hole where the lid should have been, reminding me of soap bubbles escaping from an over filled washing-machine. The teapot looked so lovely that it took my breath away. 'It's not the same; it never will be,' said Granny, coming up behind me. 'But everyone who comes to see me these days tells me how lovely it looks. I always used to say, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever", she added thoughtfully, 'and I suppose it is still beautiful, but in a different sort of way.'
Granny's teapot had been broken in pieces, it was a mess, it seemed a hopeless case. Maybe Granny at one point did not feel it was worth continuing with the intricate repair job if her precious teapot
could never be the same again. How did she feel about the person who had dropped it? I know she was furious with him at first, but later she must have decided to set aside her resentment, or she could never have lavished so much loving care on reshaping her treasure.
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